Category Archives: Thinking Aloud

July 14, 2008 · 3:22 pm

EdPsych

When I meet young folks for informational interviews (and with a daughter whose class just graduated college, there are a lot of them!), I’m often asked about what I studied to move ahead in my career.  I usually tell them that the most important class I ever took was Educational Psychology.  Ed Psych, as we called it, is about how people learn.   Sure, you learn more about how that process occurs in early childhood than adulthood, but Piaget and Bloom aside, you learn quite a bit about motivation (and motivating) and how to move people’s thought processes forward.

What is sales if not education?  What is management if not, at its core, motivation?  EdPsych laid the foundation for my management abilities and helped me understand a lot of the great business writing I read later on.

I’m not suggesting you run right out and read a textbook, but I am suggesting that maybe applying Bloom’s Taxonomy is just as valuable to business as it is to the classroom.

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July 2, 2008 · 9:15 pm

Change the Game

I read this article from the WashPo with great interest:

Businesses, governments and universities reported a 69 percent increase in data breaches in the first half of 2008 compared with a similar period in 2007, according to a study by a nonprofit group that works to prevent fraud.

As long as hundreds of thousands of sites have data that they need to secure, this issue isn’t going away.  Unless, of course, we change the game.

Why not store all data in one place, much the way we store much of our own data in “the cloud.”  Then when you or I start up a business, only give us access to the portions of that data we need and DO NOT let us store it ourselves – we tap the central repository to get what we need – no more, no less, and even then we don’t actually get it (it’s all read-only).

Think this won’t work?  Where does your Facebook data live?  Not on your PC.  When all those apps tap it, think they’re hitting you up?  Nope.  They get what they need, keep what’s truly theirs, and only use a key of some sort to associate the two.

Sometimes the way to solve the problem is to change the way the game is played.  It HAS to be easier to monitor and secure a single database than hundred of thousands (and I”m sure all the coders will tell me why I’m wrong).  Yes, a breech of the sole repository would be…um..bad but it will, IMHO, be far less likely.

And I guess a business guy writing about tech is changing the game as well!

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June 30, 2008 · 2:49 pm

Leaving well enough alone

I’m not a Luddite, by any means.  That should be obvious based on the field in which I consult (digital media) since the business of digital media itself didn’t really exist 15 years ago.

Mozilla has released Firefox 3 and it’s great.  Mostly.  Except it breaks things.  My site looks funny in it – I know other sites have had issues too.  Some folks’ CMS refuses to work properly with it.  I’m sure there are applications that are a bit screwy too.

Sometimes in our zeal to make things better, we screw up some of the things that are working well.  We used to hear that at the NHL when we’d tinker with rules, etc. and I know Mozilla released enough betas that we could have tested.  But I do think there are times  when maybe we need to think about leaving well enough alone.  As my friend the hit midget (for another post) reminded me – New Coke wasn’t exactly a huge improvement.

So here’s the business thought.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t continue to improve but sometimes we change up our businesses to make smallish incremental gains.  Maybe we’re blowing up the good stuff to fix the stuff that’s not working?

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